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Finished Metro 2033 for the second time, this time on Ranger Easy difficulty. While I like the game, some of its design flaws become really obvious on higher difficulties. Whoever thought of those &&^&*) amoebas, or considered it a good idea to severely limit the amount of gas mask filters in a game meant to be explored, needs to think again next time.

A couple of weeks ago I returned from a trip to California/Nevada, so I will be replaying GTA: San Andreas now. Really looking forward to visiting all those landmarks in San Andreas again, I love that game so much.

It's a lovely thing but I think you die a BIT too often, even for a Roguealike, and I'm not convinced the controls are as bang-on as some of it's platforming bits really need.

The fact that the 360 controller stick is inaccurate in MENUS, let alone in-game, does not fill me with the desire to play through some of the 'stab platform' rooms.

It's not SMB - either of them - in that department. It needs some work - it may even be better on keyboard, I need to try that, in fact.

p.s. tried the keyboard option, holy fuck it's WORSE, even redefining the keys is a job-and-a-half and the non-combat keys can't be changed and are 'odd' to say the least (press up to talk, S to proceed and D to go back).

Shame - lovely idea but if you're going to make a tough platformer/G&G combat game, you need to get the controls right.

Finally, in single player, I've gone back to my old second Dragon Age: Origins playthrough (elven mage, playing "good with a wild streak" where my first playthrough was a pragmatic-to-the-point-of-cruel rogue). It's taking some time to get back up to speed, but I picked up some DLC and am hoping to finish this out and finally play Awakenings for the first time before (for better or worse) moving on to DA2 to see whether all the hate is justified.

Interestingly, I have an unfinished second Dragon Age: Origins playthrough (elven mage, playing "good with a wild streak" where my first playthrough was a pragmatic-to-the-point-of-cruel rogue). I also didn't do DLC the first time around, but plan to do them once I get back to the game. Any chance your rogue was a dwarf noble? My elven mage is sort of pro-elf, but highly tolerant.

I liked DA2, but also agree with most of the criticism. It's more arcadey. I actually prefer the story of DA2, since DA:O was incredibly generic (LotR in beige, basically).

The Rogue Legacy demo is delicious. Castlevania works perfectly stretched over a roguelike skeleton. Someone was complaining loudly about the controls on the front page, but while the jumping could certainly use a bit of tightening up it wasn't enough to put me off pre-ordering it.

The player customization, particularly the rune system, is surprisingly intricate. Being able to choose between a quintuple-jumping acrobat and an all-powerful vampire is pretty great. I'm sure some people will be put off by the "grindy" nature of the castle system, but this isn't a game you were going to beat on your first attempt anyway. In fact, it took me about two dozen deaths before it "clicked" and I started bringing back enough gold to really make any progress.

In other words, I'm with John. But then I've also put 96 hours into The Binding of Isaac, so this is very much my forte.

Picked up Rochard off the humble bundle for like 50p or something. It's ok ish for a platformer. Humour is good and all, but the end of the day it is a platformer and doubt I will ever get 20% into the game.

Played Rise of Nations for the first time, me and a friend vs two AI. 3 hour game. It's a great, great game, however the instant unit construction sort of ruins it once you get that tech. I think perhaps the default research time could be toned down as we got to the modern military stage far too quickly and ended up only really attacking then. Ah well, lookin forward to playing more.

Played a bit of Mystara and started Unepic which I got in some bundle. It's actually pretty okay. You can see that it never quite reaches the quality of the top tier indie metroidvanias but it could be a lot worse. There is, however, the writing which is execrable. I had to look up a new word to describe how bad it is.
They should just pulled a Gantz. Drop an ordinary guy in an absurd life-or-death scenario and then giant aliens show up that look suspiciously like the ones from Avatar and they harvest humans. Hmm, or maybe I dreamed that.
I think there were vampires, too. There always are.

Even though I have an incredibly low tolerance for horror, I still get the craving for it every once in awhile. So I loaded up Kraven Manor, played for roughly 45 minutes and promptly exited upon discovering a multitude of the thing that had been chasing me the whole time. No more cravings for me! Great game though.

I played Gunpoint the other day. I had a bit of fun with it, but was quite disappointed as I think it could have been so much more than it is. I feel like I played a really well-polished proof of concept or demo version, with a great idea behind it, enjoyable basic mechanics, but uninspired level design that never moves far beyond what I'd expect from a tutorial phase. There were no interesting puzzles to solve, in a game that feels like it was built for them. I'm not up with the details of the level editor, but I hope some interesting custom levels will emerge.

Picked up Rochard off the humble bundle for like 50p or something. It's ok ish for a platformer. Humour is good and all, but the end of the day it is a platformer and doubt I will ever get 20% into the game.

It's rather short and some of the abilities you get later in the game are fun so I'd recommend you try to push on a bit more. I found that it ended just as it started to get boring.

Nicolas Winding Refn is thanked in the Hotline Miami Credits. He's the director of Drive, a (wonderful) film by which the game unquestionably is influenced (especially the soundtrack is similarly awesome as HLM's). And yes, the rest are influences from various Tarantinos, noir films or japanese classics.

I'm also playing Mark of the Ninja and I have a similar quarrel with it. Apart from the very fluid movement and great pace of action and waiting, the checkpointing system is a bit opaque. I'd like to have more obvious save points both when coming up and where last was saved. given that you can only revert to the last savepoint and the game seems to save at all kinds of places across the level, this can easily screw up your level when you're experimenting or hunting chievos.

It all seemed so clear when I hit that first big round symbol with the ravens (something like that would have been ideal), but they don't seem commited to that system. Goes to show how difficult a good automatic checkpoint save system is. even very liberal approaches, like Tom Francis' autosave in Gunpoint, can elimiate challenge and quite a bit of fun.

What with the new Combat rebalance I’m Tempted to give The Witcher 2 another play through, siding with Iorveth and the Hippies this time round. Might do it on Dark Mode though as unless I’m missing something it sounds like things are going to be a lot easier. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing in a game which is all about the big picture.